Now it seems, what with the elections recently passed in Canada and Alberta, and elections happening in the US, that we're not being offered a viable selection of candidates to choose from.
Popularity is not a qualification.
Now while leadership courses abound, few offer any measurable increase in skills and none are relevant towards leading a country. And everyone seems to have their own idea as to what constitutes "leadership" - in Alberta, most people feel that business is a great background, as if the country were somehow a corporation that exists to serve shareholders. While some aspects of the metaphor hold up, what generally transpires then is you end up with a government that favors corporations over people, and a fundamental principle of government is "For the people, by the people", not "For the corporations, by the corporations".
Education - degrees in Economics, Drama, Teaching, Political Science - where relevant embraces only a narrow aspect of government, or embraces theory over fact, and where irrelevant serves only to make the leaders a laughingstock.
So what then, would be an appropriate combination of skills and background, that would serve as a prerequisite for leading the country? Implicitly we like a post-secondary education, a church-going family man (married, with children), it's nice if you speak French (Canada is bilingual, after all), it's swell if you've a successful business background (inspires confidence), but each of these skills on their own and taken together hardly qualify anyone to run a Country.
But explicitly, what qualifications should we ask for? If we were running a help-wanted ad for Prime Minister, what would be some of the skills and background we'd look for?
Probably someone who had lived a fair number of years both in the East and West of the country, to gain an broad understanding of each of the provinces expectations of government. Too frequently we select leaders that have lived their entire lives in a single province, and govern as if that province were the world. A demonstrable understanding, first-hand, of the global economy, and of the history of the country, a shared determination as to the future of the country, perhaps someone who had financed their own education (because those people who have had their education given to them have a very different view of the world than those who have had to earn it), and perhaps favor candidates who had lived abroad a minimum of X years in countries that differed Q,Y,Z in terms of politics, GDP, etc.
These are just suggestions with a view at making you think: What background would your ideal candidate have? And what prerequisites would you consider imperative for the governance of a Country?